SOURCE: “Dolorès Disparue,” in Symposium, Vol. XX, No. 2, Summer, 1966, pp. 135-40.

In the following essay, Jones examines the parallels between Lolita in Nabokov's novel and Albertine in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time.

“The Poor Woman”—Charlotte Haze, mother of Dolores Haze, alias Lolita, chosen nymphet of the gay madman Humbert Humbert—

busied herself with a number of things she had foregone long before or had never been much interested in, as if (to prolong these Proustian intonations) by my marrying the mother of the child I loved I had enabled my wife to regain an abundance of youth by proxy.¹

(I.18)

Vladimir Nabokov has Humbert express his amused disdain in what is indeed a capsule parody of Proust's analytic style, in a sentence which is briefer than most Proustian incantations, but which retains the Proustian love of intellectual exploration and syntactical qualification. Similarly, many of...